


Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er dabei zum Ungeheuer wird

by Seika



Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: AD&D 2e ruleset and lore, Amn, Illusions, Post-Throne of Bhaal, ToT: Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-24 13:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8373166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seika/pseuds/Seika
Summary: “One who fights with monsters must look to it that he too becomes a monster.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xiuxi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xiuxi/gifts).



Gerita the Shadow Thief wasn’t happy.

“Fucking hate this job.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Fucking hate not knowing nothing ‘bout what’s going on.”

“Said that too.”

“Fucking hate gnomes.”

“Said that a lot.”

“Fucking hate this prick of a gnome even more.”

“Yep, said that as well.”

Her partner, Cataldo of the same Thieves, was also pretty fed up by now. It wasn’t subtle.

 

“Little turnip-eating shit beats his wife. Beats his kid. They run off. We gotta drag ‘em back. Even was the second time too, from what I heard. Whole business was all ore of the worst fucking quality from the start, before we knew anyone was actually after him.” Gerita spat off the warehouse’s balcony onto the straw-covered floor below.

“Ore it may be, but our pay’s gold, so we do our jobs, Ger.” Cataldo would have scolded his friend for – well, lots of things. Whining. Giving up their position. A total lack of professionalism in general. But, frankly, he was no more pleased with guarding Vaelag the gnome than she was.

Vaelag had once been a firm Shadow Thief asset, a valuable point of contact in the unstable slums of the southern Bridge District. He’d had his fingers in all the pies: an incredible feat, especially when it meant he had to keep up with the eccentricities of his fellow gnomes. (An odd lot even by their generally lax standards – settled gnomes were practically unknown in Amn; poor ones that had suddenly decided to move into Athkatla were all the stranger and, unhappily, less welcome for it).

If he didn’t treat his family kindly, well, that was no business of the Shadow Thieves, at least up until the point where he was risking waking up with a crossbow bolt through the head. And there’d been no indication even now that things had gone that far: when they’d brought Lissa back after her latest escape, she’d been miserable and terrified – but also resigned and oddly (stupidly, he thought) hopeful that Vaelag wanting his family back meant he still _loved_ them. If there was any anger in her, it had been buried under fear and self-delusion for a long time.

Professional detachment was key in their business, even if it stuck in a few personal craws.

There had been questions about his position shortly after the trackers assigned to Gorion’s Ward had reported a confrontation. Even then, the Shadow Thieves had been in desperate need of the young Bhaalspawn’s help, and crossing her had looked like it was going to get Vaelag’s throat cut either by a pissed-off godling or by the people utterly desperate to _avoid_ a pissed-off godling. But somehow he’d walked out of it and, if anything, his success had enhanced his standing.

All well and good, but it hadn’t lasted. A year or so later, as Amn was recovering from the Bhaalspawn War – well, its disruption to trade, and that was what Amn cared about far more than any lives that might have happened to be lost down in the massacres ravaging Tethyr – Vaelag had come under attack.

 

It had begun subtly enough. Vaelag had been noticed – or, really, not _Vaelag_ , but just flashes of his distinctive clothing, sounds of his voice through locked doors – attending certain indiscreet locations. Purveyors of dubious loans. Sellers of perverse peccadillos. Traders of bizarre drugs. Once, a meeting with a Westgate merchant cabal known to be in with the Night Masks, which resulted in a raking-over-hot-coals that would have been very literal for anyone of lower standing in the guild.

Then it had been inconsistencies in Vaelag’s accounts of actual meetings with other Shadow Thieves. He’d swear he’d turned up to a council at which no-one else had seen him, and that he’d tried to contribute but everyone else had talked over him and ignored his existence entirely. Or the absolute opposite: he’d been unavoidably detained by a bizarre sequence of events involving literal barrels of Chultian monkeys, but everyone knew he’d been there, offering stupid and insulting remarks while looking stoned off his head. His gabbled excuses and explanations had won him no favours.

Next was more concerning. Vaelag’s house had become haunted, he whispered – or shouted, but never found any volume in between. His walls murmured to him, sounds barely beyond the range of comprehension, but _urgent_ , _important,_ if only he could understand. His doors opened when he wasn’t there – he never came home except to a house standing open for all to see – but stayed adamantly closed to him except by their own will. He developed an unnerving habit of pleading pathetically with them, one which quickly spread even outside his house. It was pitiful, and shaming, and horrifically embarrassing, when around the guildhall to see a once-feared strongman begging and wheedling with a few ordinary planks of wood.

The worst of it, though, was the floors. Vaelag swore blind that they’d taken to disappearing from under him at a moment’s notice, letting him tumble away into a lightless abyss for completely indeterminate lengths of time: without any way to tell the time except his own panicked heartbeat, he sometimes claimed to have been falling for years. On several of the occasions that he’d told this story, he displayed his bruised sides or black eye or bloodied nose as incontrovertible proof. Pointing out that any fall as long as he’d supposedly had should have broken pretty much every bone in his body, not given him some scuffs, was met with fear and accusations of being in league with Vaelag’s floors. That was a new one, Cataldo had to admit. He’d been accused of many things in his life, most of them rightly, if he told the truth (which, as a policy, he never did). Never before of being in league with floorboards.

The Thieves’ priests exorcised his house, partly as a precaution, and partly in the hope that it might calm Vaelag down. More seriously, those same priests put up every ward and defence against intrusive magic they could. The maxim that “three times is enemy action” ran deep in the Shadow Thieves’ veins. Vaelag might well just be an utter loon, but if someone was out for the guildmaster’s blood, or at least his sanity, that was a challenge the most powerful criminal network in Faerûn could not tolerate.

Finally, all their efforts finished, Vaelag made a shaky, uncertain journey from one end of the house to the other. Gerita and Cataldo had kept firm hands on each of his shoulders: reassuring him, steering him, and just keeping him upright so he didn’t kowtow to a door or pull himself along the floor using his nails. When he finished, everything apparently in order, he broke down and wept, and then ran backwards and forwards through the house, thanking them all the while. For that hour, for the first time in a month, he was safe and sound.

The next day, he’d stumbled into a guildmasters’ meeting, pulled off his hood, and the nearest priest of Mask had immediately tried to purify him with divine fire. The boils, lesions, and purple skin had apparently been symptoms of a particularly nasty disease passed around by demonkind. More specifically, by sex. And “Hellhound’s Blaze” had begun exactly where its name suggested.

It had taken a tenday of ineffective (but deeply painful and embarrassing treatments) and four separate divination sessions before anyone had worked out that Vaelag’s protestations of innocence were actually sincere. He was the subject of a particularly well-crafted and stubborn _Plague_ spell, an illusion which conjured up all the details of a sickness to everyone except the subject himself.

The guildmasters had tried to suppress the news, of course, but while the walls of secrecy that kept everyone else from knowing the Shadow Thieves’ business were thick and strong as ever, stopping gossip from flowing around _within_ the guild was another thing entirely. Thieves from Tethyr to Baldur’s Gate had heard about the gnome that had got it off with a demon dog, and the story of an illusion had for the most part been discarded as a) obviously a cover-up, and b) boring.

That might have been dealt with, but now they were certain someone had it out for their gnomish representative. Everyone was on edge, restless, waiting for the next attack. Vaelag himself didn’t sleep. Not for one night, then not for the next, then not for the one after, until they finally realised their enemy had already struck. Every time Vaelag laid down his head and shut his eyes, he woke immediately, screaming about visions of horror. A pitiless asylum filled with tortured souls and soulless beasts. A city sacked and razed, the stench of burnt flesh and rotting corpses palpable from miles away, but growing stronger and stronger as Vaelag was forced to approach, enough that he woke up vomiting and continued to retch for hours after. The void of utter blackness masquerading as a sky on some evil plane, lit only by blood-red flares of light as magma burst up from the volcano below – but all the horrors that light showed made him wish the malevolent darkness would just swallow him instead.

The _places_ were far from the worst of it. Over the month he went without a wink of sleep, Vaelag was treated to an unending of ways he – or, on some occasions, half-forgotten childhood friends, pleading faces wracked with agony – could choose to die. (He was always insistent that he was been given his choices, though could never explain how he knew it). Flesh dissolving to dust under the gaze of a beholder. Brain sucked out by the unescapable grasp of a mind flayer’s tentacles. Flayed by tentacle rods in a drow torture pit. Cooked in plate armour by a dragon’s breath. Tossed into the horrid maw of the Prince of Demons. Limbs withering at the touch of floating blades of bone. Drained and drained and drained by the touches of shadows, until there was nothing left of him but another shadow.

By now, the slums’ reservists had been called up on his behalf, patrolling Vaelag’s warehouses and home turf subtly and not-so-subtly. Which was obviously going to be piss-all use against whatever archmage had it out for Vaelag, but no-one felt like pointing that out to the higher-ups. Probably they knew themselves, but had to do something to keep the frothing lunatic onside. The Thieves held up their strength outside Athkatla, had to if they weren’t to lose it all, but within their home city, they had been decimated by factional squabbles and the war with Bodhi. Only reputation kept them together, and abandoning one of their most prominent guildmasters would have brought everything tumbling down.

And _how_ the lunatic frothed these days. Eyes bloodshot and almost permanently rolling in their sockets, stinking of sweat and filth and alcohol, Vaelag never stayed in any place more than a couple of hours. No-one knew when he’d move – better, he mumbled, to keep ahead of the mutant griffins that were hunting him. And, for their sins, Gerita and Cataldo had to go along with him whenever he decided the figments of his imagination were beginning to close in.

In short?

“Fucking hate this job” covered it pretty well.

 

Cataldo suddenly went still.

 _What_ , he thought, _was that sound?_

Gerita froze within an instant of him, more because she was attuned to her partner than because she herself had picked up on anything. Their hands went to their belts, reaching for dagger hilts.

“Ooooh, you noticed. I was wondering how many times around and around it would be until you caught wind of me. Actually, you know, that reminds me of my dear cousin, Emily Jansen. She was out in the marketplace, just browsing and minding her own business, and a big ogre comes up to her and accuses her of stealing his wallet. Now, of course, Cousin Emily was completely innocent, but she could see this wasn’t a fellow particularly amenable to reason. So she offers to work security for him and says she’ll throw in a year’s supply of turnips into the bargain. Set a thief to catch a thief, she tells him.

“This ogre’s not a very bright lad, and not a thin one either, so he’s salivating right away at the thought of all those gorgeous turnips. He agrees on the spot, and they pack up and off to his castle (I say ‘castle’: it was more of a crumbling ruin, but ogres are so vain, aren’t they?) with the ogre pulling a cart with his first month’s worth of turnips on it, and Cousin Emily riding on it quite happily.

“Anyway, this ogre is so greedy, he eats a tenday’s supply of turnips that very first night. He’s also, as I said, not so bright. Tremendously stupid and uneducated, in fact. So he doesn’t know that turnips give ogres the gas in a horrific way. He’s groaning and moaning and stinking up the entire castle, passing so much wind it could blow over even the Sacred Grove of Turnip Trees hidden deep in the Forest of Glubbleglubbleheim.

“Now, Cousin Emily’s prepared for this, and she goes around to all the other guards, who are also ogres mind you, and she tells them how their boss is the one who’s making the stench, and how greedy he is to keep all the turnips to himself, and how cruel he’s been to her (she has beautiful puppy-dog eyes, Cousin Emily: they’d melt a heart of stone), and how he’s plotting to kill all the other ogres in the castle so none of them can stop him. They, of course, believe her, and she gives them some clothes-pegs to put over their noses, for which they cheer her like a great hero. They go a-howling up to the chamber of their boss and club him to death there and then.

“After that, though, they all fall to beating each other over the head, and demanding that this one or the other one will rule the castle and all the rest of them, and kicking up a dreadful fuss. Cousin Emily, in the meantime, sneaks out with all the treasure they’re arguing over, and puts it on her cart, yokes it up to some horses she’s liberated from the stable, and rides off into the sunset. And now she’s a tremendously rich and wealthy merchant with a big fat happy family, all because of an ogre who couldn’t catch his wind.”

 

Cataldo and Gerita looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, stunned. Partly because _what the shit was that_ and partly because _oh shit, it’s Jan Jansen and we’re so dead_.

Jan popped out of the air in front of them, smiling cheerfully. Or it looked cheerful, because his face was creased with so many laughter lines – but they weren’t stretched in the way they should be if he was in any way actually amused. It was a shark’s smile, eyes flat and teeth bared, and perhaps the most completely unpleasant thing Cataldo had ever seen.

He didn’t know if it was better or worse when, his story over and his surprise sprung, Jan dropped the smile. His face grew grave: still and solemn and deadly.

“I’ve had enough now, you see. It’s enough. He’s suffered, even if it’s not as much as he should have. He’s broken, which is right. So now it’s time to make an end of it. Pay back one of my many debts to Her Highness, our Lady of Murder. Pay back a debt which I’ve owed Vaelag for a very long time. And pay back a debt I’ve owed Lissa even longer.

“I wouldn’t get in my way.”

Cataldo, for his part, agreed whole-heartedly. Gold the Shadow Thieves’ pay might be, but the promise of death in Jan Jansen’s voice was worth _mithral_. Not a chance in all the hells he was fighting one of the Five Friends of Murder, personal companions to the new goddess, victors of the Bhaalspawn War, killers of armies, sackers of cities, demon-slayers, dragonsbanes, _fuck it, get him out of there_.

Then one of their men jumped out of the shadows with a dagger poised to sink into Jan’s back, and everything went to the hells.

**Author's Note:**

> Addressing, a bit less directly than I'd planned, the subject of illusions. By 2e rules, they work until you disbelieve them, including psychosomatic effects. Jan could have directly induced a heart attack in Vaelag by having one of those illusory pits actually have a bottom at the end of it all. He thinks he's broken his neck, and his brain stops his heart. It's a crazy kind of magic.
> 
> Certain details, beyond just the spells ( _Plague_ , _Hallucinatory Terrain_ &c.), are taken more directly from tabletop than game canon. Hence the slums (which aren't an official Athkatlan district) are just the southern end of the Bridge District, gnomes are rarely meant to be ever seen in Amn, the use of precious metals (from ore all the way up to mithral) as Amnian expressions of worth, and so on.
> 
> The tone in this is _so_ all over the place and I can only hope it works. Also something I hope works is the Jansen story (TM). Getting the edge to them right (all the more important here) and not devolving into randomfishmalkmonkeycheese, while retaining the humour, was something I found difficult.


End file.
